qemu-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [PATCH] qcow2: Allow resize of images with internal snapshots


From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: [PATCH] qcow2: Allow resize of images with internal snapshots
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 09:35:35 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.7.0

On 4/23/20 8:55 AM, Max Reitz wrote:
On 22.04.20 22:53, Eric Blake wrote:
We originally refused to allow resize of images with internal
snapshots because the v2 image format did not require the tracking of
snapshot size, making it impossible to safely revert to a snapshot
with a different size than the current view of the image.  But the
snapshot size tracking was rectified in v3, and our recent fixes to
qemu-img amend (see 0a85af35) guarantee that we always have a valid
snapshot size.  Thus, we no longer need to artificially limit image
resizes, but it does become one more thing that would prevent a
downgrade back to v2.  And now that we support different-sized
snapshots, it's also easy to fix reverting to a snapshot to apply the
new size.

Upgrade iotest 61 to cover this (we previously had NO coverage of
refusal to resize while snapshots exist).  Note that the amend process
can fail but still have effects: in particular, since we break things
into upgrade, resize, downgrade, if a failure does not happen until a
later phase (such as the downgrade attempt), earlier steps are still
visible (a truncation and downgrade attempt will fail, but only after
truncating data).  But even before this patch, an attempt to upgrade
and resize would fail but only after changing the image to v3.  In
some sense, partial image changes on failure are inevitible, since we
can't avoid a mid-change EIO (if you are trying to amend more than one
thing at once, but something fails, I hope you have a backup image).


@@ -775,10 +776,22 @@ int qcow2_snapshot_goto(BlockDriverState *bs, const char 
*snapshot_id)
      }

      if (sn->disk_size != bs->total_sectors * BDRV_SECTOR_SIZE) {
-        error_report("qcow2: Loading snapshots with different disk "
-            "size is not implemented");
-        ret = -ENOTSUP;
-        goto fail;
+        BlockBackend *blk = blk_new(bdrv_get_aio_context(bs),
+                                    BLK_PERM_RESIZE, BLK_PERM_ALL);
+        ret = blk_insert_bs(blk, bs, &local_err);

I wonder whether maybe we should reintroduce blk_new_with_bs().

This code segment is copied from what 'qemu-img amend' does, so adding a helper function would indeed make life a bit easier for more than one spot in the code base. Separate patch, obviously.


+++ b/block/qcow2.c
@@ -3988,14 +3988,21 @@ static int coroutine_fn 
qcow2_co_truncate(BlockDriverState *bs, int64_t offset,

      qemu_co_mutex_lock(&s->lock);

-    /* cannot proceed if image has snapshots */
-    if (s->nb_snapshots) {
-        error_setg(errp, "Can't resize an image which has snapshots");
+    /*
+     * Even though we store snapshot size for all images, it was not
+     * required until v3, so it is not safe to proceed for v2.
+     */
+    if (s->nb_snapshots && s->qcow_version < 3) {
+        error_setg(errp, "Can't resize a v2 image which has snapshots");
          ret = -ENOTSUP;
          goto fail;
      }

-    /* cannot proceed if image has bitmaps */
+    /*
+     * For now, it's easier to not proceed if image has bitmaps, even
+     * though we could resize bitmaps, because it is not obvious
+     * whether new bits should be set or clear.

The previous comment was incorrect as well, but actually
qcow2_truncate_bitmaps_check() doesn’t return an error when there is any
bitmap, but only if there are non-active bitmaps, or active bitmaps that
cannot be modified.  So for non-disabled bitmaps, we generally do
happily proceed.

The comment change is collateral (only because I noticed it in the diff); but I could indeed reword it slightly more accurately as:

Check if bitmaps prevent a resize. Although bitmaps can be resized, there are situations where we don't know whether to set or clear new bits, so for now it's easiest to just prevent resize in those cases.

And since it is a collateral change, it may even be worth splitting into a separate patch.

+++ b/tests/qemu-iotests/061
@@ -111,6 +111,29 @@ $PYTHON qcow2.py "$TEST_IMG" dump-header
  $QEMU_IO -c "read -P 0x2a 42M 64k" "$TEST_IMG" | _filter_qemu_io
  _check_test_img

+echo
+echo "=== Testing resize with snapshots ==="
+echo
+_make_test_img -o "compat=0.10" 32M
+$QEMU_IO -c "write -P 0x2a 24M 64k" "$TEST_IMG" | _filter_qemu_io
+$QEMU_IMG snapshot -c foo "$TEST_IMG"
+$QEMU_IMG resize "$TEST_IMG" 64M                         # fails
+$PYTHON qcow2.py "$TEST_IMG" dump-header

What am I looking for in the header dump?

I was looking primarily for version (2 vs. 3), size (did it change), and number of snapshots. You're right that grepping for what changes will make this easier to maintain.


Also, I personally prefer self-testing tests, because I don’t trust
myself when I have to interpret the reference output on my own...  As
such, I think it would make sense to not just put those “# fails”
comments here, but an explicit test on $? instead.  (E.g. by
“|| echo ERROR”, although I can see that would be weird in the
expected-failure case as “&& echo ERROR”.)

Good idea.


+$QEMU_IMG snapshot -c bar "$TEST_IMG"
+$QEMU_IMG resize --shrink "$TEST_IMG" 64M                # succeeds
+$PYTHON qcow2.py "$TEST_IMG" dump-header
+$QEMU_IMG amend -o "compat=0.10,size=32M" "$TEST_IMG"    # fails, image left v3
+$PYTHON qcow2.py "$TEST_IMG" dump-header

Again, a grep for the image size would help focus the reference output.

(In addition, _img_info would give us snapshot information.  Might be
interesting.  So maybe the best thing would be to grep the image
version, image size, and snapshot list from the image info every time.)

Yep, that's the same list I was noticing when writing the patch.


Speaking of the image size.  Is it intentional that the size is changed
to 32 MB?  Should amend work more like a transaction, in that we should
at least do a loose check on whether the options can be changed before
we touch the image?

Yes, the commit message tried to call it out. It's a pre-existing problem - during amend, we DO make changes to the disk in one step, with no way to roll back those changes, even if a later step fails.

Pre-patch, if you request an upgrade to v3 as well as a resize, but resize fails, you still end up with the image being changed to v3. That's no different from post-patch where if you request a resize and a downgrade to v2, the resize happens but not the downgrade. On the bright side, our current failure scenarios at least leave the resulting image viable, even if it is not the same as it was pre-attempt.


Also, there’s a problem of ordering here.  The command as you’ve written
doesn’t have this specific problem, but imagine the size was still 128
MB before (just like the snapshot).  Then what the command does depends
on the order in which the operations are executed: If we change the
version first, the size cannot be changed because of the internal
snapshot.  If we change the size first, the version can no longer be
changed because the internal snapshot has a different size than the image.

Yes, it was a pain for me while writing the tests. At one point I even considered swapping things to do the resize after the downgrade, but that introduces a different problem: the downgrade depends on knowing the post-transaction size (because downgrading is safe only when all internal snapshots match the post-resize length), but we aren't passing the desired size through to the upgrade and downgrade functions. Worse, if we swap the downgrade first, and it succeeds but then resize fails, the image is no longer viable; at least with the current ordering, even though user data has been truncated, it remains v3 so the size differences in snapshots don't break the image (and the user DID request an image resize, so it's not like we are discarding data accidentally).

If we want to avoid truncating an image at all costs on any potential failure path, we have to add a lot more plumbing (not to say it's a bad thing, just that it's more work). And no matter how much plumbing we add, or transaction-like rollback capabilities we add, there's still the risk that we will hit a late EIO error leaving the image in a half-changed state, even if none of our sanity checks failed. Or put another way, without some sort of journaling, the best we can do is defer all writes until we know the full set of changes, which limits the likelihood of a half-baked change to a write failure. But since we can only reduce, and not eliminate, the possibility of a half-baked change, the question then becomes whether it is worth the engineering effort of additional complexity for even more corner cases and less risk, or just leave things as they are (if qemu-img amend fails, we make no guarantees about the state of your image).



(Hypothetical problems that turn out not to be any in practice:

Or, maybe more interesting: What if we try to amend to
compat=0.10,size=128M here?

If the size is changed first, the command will succeed, because then the
snapshot size matches the image size again.  If qemu-img attempts to
change the version first, the whole command will fail.

As I noted above, the size is indeed changed before the version (hence
us getting a 32 MB v3 image here), so the compat=0.10,size=128M amend
would indeed succeed.  But that’s luck.

OTOH, that means that if you have a v2 image with a snapshot and want to
make it a v3 image and resize it at the same time, that would fail by
the same logic, because the size cannot be changed for v2 images.  So
for that case it’d be bad luck.

But we always upgrade an image first in the amend process and downgrade
it last, to address specifically such cases: Allow adding new features
along with the upgrade, and strip unsupported features right before the
downgrade.  So that’s all good.  But I think it still shows that the
dependencies are getting a bit hairy.)

I'm not sure the work in making amend more transaction-like is worth it - yes, we can add more validation code up front before making the first write change, but as some of the later changes depend on information that would be changed earlier, that becomes a lot more state we have to collect during our initial probes (my example being that the downgrade attempt depends on knowing the final image size, and that's a lot easier when the image has already been resized rather than having to pass the new size through).

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]